Potri Ranka Manis

RN & Community Health Worker Trainer

Small business needs:…it was difficult for a small organization like ours with only 3 employees at the time to find affordable health insurance packages.

Workforce: it was difficult to find funding to hire community health workers to serve our community.

Health care reform is important to me because:

Small Business Needs: After the passage of ACA , our organization was happy to know that because of healthcare reform, small businesses would receive tax subsidies for providing health coverage for their employees, and we were glad to find that this provision extended to nonprofit 501c3 organizations. We were also able to find affordable options and became able to provide full coverage for medical, dental and vision.

Workforce: Our organization also had received an increase in funding from our partner (an academic institution our organization partners with for a CBPR grant) which enabled our organization to hire 3 additional Community Health Workers whose health coverage we could support. This increase in funding could be attributed to the need to further build the CHW workforce in community settings, given the fact that several sections of ACA recognize CHWs’ crucial role in achieving important health care reform goals. For instance, with the ACA’s emphasis on community-based preventive care, community-based health teams, and patient-centered medical homes, CHWs become vital to the restructuring of the delivery of primary healthcare. The federal grant that supports our academic-community partnership calls for strategies that build sustainable interventions to address health disparities. This type of investment helps provide resources for our organization’s staffing, benefits, facilities costs and was one step towards sustaining our CHW program in a community-based organization setting.